Monday, January 11, 2010

Night Falls, And Keeps On Falling



Somewhere in the darkness I hear the computer breathing.
It sounds like a man packed in ice in a dark hospital room,
each breath forced through the tubes of some machine
that draws and amplifies each rattling breath. All the
while the machine sits there in utterly objective silence,
waiting for the man to finally find something to say.
I listen until the computer sighs, and then stops breathing.

And now I suppose it's time to go looking for a hole
to park my own corner, or a corner to park my hole,
a shadow that doesn't require any light to grow,
a dream without a single recognizable face or place.
Because I'm tired of trying to say something lovely.
Go ahead, try to say something lovely --go right
ahead-- and see for yourself how damn hard it is.

Is it possible too much loveliness
has already been written and spoken?
It cannot be, because when there is nothing lovely
left to say one must inevitably resort to ugliness,
which should not have a place in a world of so much
loveliness, but boy does it ever. Ugliness, carelessness,
ruthlessness, naked ambition, covetousness, evil:

they flourish precisely because loveliness is so
fucking hard, even as it is everywhere, all around us,
thumbing its nose at the abject helplessness of words.

14 comments:

  1. ...yes, loveliness is hard, but watching leroy and kiko sleeping so peacefully - there so much loveliness right there.
    s.

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  2. Yes, a whole lot of loveliness right there. Bless those boys.

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  3. Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists.

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  4. I see unmistakably real things threatened every day, and unreal things that clearly exist. "Am I to blame if hallucinations and visions are alive and have names and permanent residences?" --Karl Kraus, "Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths."

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  5. The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.

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  6. There are no random events, nor are there events or things that exist by and for themselves, in isolation. The atoms that make up your body were once forged inside stars, and the causes of even the smallest event are virtually infinite and connected with the whole in incomprehensible ways.

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  7. That sounds like something out of O Magazine, and fits my favored definition of profanity: an inanity masquerading as profundity. Still, I admire positive thinking, wherever I encounter it, and thank you. Sincerely.

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  8. I was referring to the post previous to the previous (if that makes sense). I actually very much like the second.

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  9. If you trace back the cause of any event, you would have to go back all the way to the beginning of creation. The cosmos is not chaotic. The very word cosmos means order. But this is not an order the human mind can ever comprehend, although it can sometimes glimpse it.

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  10. Don't seek happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness. Happiness is ever elusive, but freedom from unhappiness is attainable now.....

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  11. Now it sounds like you're quoting Eckhart Tolle. I knew Oprah's fingerprints were all over this stuff. Which is fine.

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  12. And I say bless you for coming here, and being here.

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  13. And when the evening comes today, we will remember nothing but the peace of God. For we will we learn today what peace is ours, when we forget all things except God's love.

    You are loved.

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  14. "The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it." If that's masquerading as profundity, it's a pretty poor disguise. It's the kind of thing that might be true if you've got all your basic survival needs met, but there are millions of people at this moment struggling to keep their kids from dying of disease, starvation, violence, etc. And if they are unhappy about that, or about holding the lifeless body of the child they conceived and bore, I don't think a dose of positive thinking can or should do a goddamn thing about it. Just one example among many of why phrases like that are full of shit. And often an excuse for those whose basic needs are met to forget about those whose aren't.

    That said, I'm with Jergie in liking the next comment.

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